Vista SP1 or not?

The reason I asked here is I used my HTPC to watch BD movies a lot and PDVD & AnyDVD HD are the most important components in this set up. So if it is not any features improvements perhaps I should say not a advantage in the area I describe above, I might just sit on the side line and wait a bot longer.

Vista SP1 does not use performance enhancing drugs. Networking is a bit improved I guess. Maybe. But performance is the same as it was before...dog slow compared to XP or Win2k8 Server. Nonetheless, install issues of the SP itself notwithstanding, it's safe to install. I've been running it since the middle of Feb with no problems.

I've been reading online that some people said they felt SP1 made their system feel/seem faster (something with respect to memory use). Either these people were fools (and I didn't really pay too much attention to what they were saying), or 4 gigs of Corsair XMS2 Dominator (QUAD2X4096-8500C5DF) DDR2-1066 (that I've also overclocked slightly) are good enough that I don't notice a difference even with Aero enabled.

I've been reading online that some people said they felt SP1 made their system feel faster (something with respect to memory use). Either these people were fools, or 4 gigs of Corsair XMS2 Dominator (QUAD2X4096-8500C5DF) DDR2-1066 (that I've also overclocked slightly) are good enough that I don't notice a difference even with Aero enabled.

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I don't believe them. I have it on 5 machines in this house and not one of them "seems faster". They seem the same. I also believe that performance in a lot of cases is not related to anything Vista controls and that it comes down to drivers. At least partially. (Drivers don't explain how a well configured Windows 2k8 Server machine *BURIES* Vista on the same hardware and drivers. I mean it's not even CLOSE.) But, other than networking, there doesn't appear to be any improvement at all and some areas have actually slowed down. It certainly seems a bit more stable than before but I attribute that not to Vista but to the maturing state of drivers.

My guess is it "seems faster" to a lot of people the same way that 24/96 audio "seems better".

The thing is that some copy operations in pre-SP1 were ridiculously slow, in like the kB/s range. So far it hasn't happened with SP1 with me, but I really don't know. I'm just crossing my fingers here. That said, my experience with Vista has been rather pleasant and non-eventful, except of course from the slight annoyance of having to disable the dreaded UAC and many other resource-hogging "performance" stuff. Indexer being another extremely annoying idiotic "feature" to me.

I too think that large file copy is quite a bit faster, but then they did say a part of the problem was the progress bar would stop and start even though progress was actually steadier. Now the progress bar moves more smoothly but it may not always be any quicker. So it could be part perception and part reality.

while nothing to do with anydvd, ms still have not fixed the bug that causes explorer.exe to start using 99% of its cpu forever, even if no explorer windows are open. (and this is on my quad core pc) im not impresssed, the other stuff they fixed are less important.

that and i have to leave windows updates off because trustedinstaller.exe will randomly start using 99% cpu.